IMPORTANT: The following journal is intended for the use and viewing of approved persons only and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this work is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word ‘absquatulation’ has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the creation of this journal and a minimum of Microsoft software was used. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards.

• What a woeful speechmaker I am. I think writing a short speech after midnight last night, reading it through in my head once and briefly summarising it does not constitute rehearsing and learning. In fact, after having stood up the front and been unable to think of much to say, I am entirely sure of that. I’d even go so far as to say I’d have been better off not writing anything at all. The problem was, I wrote what I thought was a relatively good five minute speech, and then tried to deliver that based on the very summarised notes I had, which as I’d not read it enough I found I was unable to do, but because I had read it, I tried to speak on something I couldn’t remember. It was rather awkward until I gave up and just made it up on the spot. This is the first time I’ve ever given a public speech, so I guess I learnt a few things. One thing that did annoy me is that the few people before me all gave their speeches as we’d been told to do, so I tried and sort of managed to, but nearly all the people after me simply got up and read a prewritten speech. I could have so easily taken my prewritten speech and just read that if I’d known.

COMP2500

• Directly after my debilitating speech giving, I had to present in our “Programming in the Large” tutorial. Typically, our group got the hardest bit of code, which I don’t think anyone short of an experienced coder could manage to convert to a dynamic abstract data type representation in the time we had as we only had half the tute, the second half being devoted to questions about our assignments. We scribbled some code, helped a lot by one member who’s currently doing a course almost entirely on abstract data types, and I presented it to the rest of the tutorial. Then we were given our assignments, and the perfect result I had partly made up for my definitely less than perfect performance in my speech this morning. The fact that everyone else there seemed to have worse marks helped too.